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generator: pandoc
title: How To Install EMACS On Your Nintendo Wii
viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes'
---
2020-06-24T23:35:30+08:00
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** HOW TO INSTALL EMACS ON YOUR NINTENDO WII **
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Originally published on gopher on: 2019-12-15
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## Why is this an interesting thing to carry out? ##
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the nintendo wii is my favourite video game console, because its
hardware design is fascinating, and it is by far one of the easiest
consoles to jailbreak and root
also its controllers, with all due respect, were revolutionary, and
really made video games more accessible to an enormously broad and
diverse audience
the console encouraged innovative human-computer interface metaphors,
many of which were completely speculative, experimental, and entirely
novel.
it is a fascinating and unique piece of hardware :-)
my main desire for getting linux on this wii was to read emails and
listen to internet radio etc on it, and use it primarily as a very low
power desktop computer!
so i suppose what i'm carrying out isn't really an absolute, universal
good, for all people - but i am certainly able to now use this device to
pirate a great many games, and utilise its exceptional graphics
processing performance for things, like watching videos etc etc
but yes! aside from that, there is no real use, apart from practicing
software freedom, really!
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okay this is what you do to get linux working on your Wii:
- download the debian distribution prepared for the Wii here:
https://github.com/neagix/wii-linux-ngx
the kernel version is pretty old, it's 3.15 or some verison of 3.X
but once you do that, make 2 partitions on an SD card:
1. - FAT16 (for booting the exploit which loads the kernel, basically
the hacked bootloader which you got access to once you rooted
your console). i'd recommend making this boot partition about
50MiB big
2. - some ext3 or ext4 partition, of a nice large size - i'd
recommend using a 64GiB SD card, because you'll need a really
big swap file for this install
put the bootloader ELF files in the FAT16 partition, and put the linux
root filesystem in the ext3/4 partition
slap dat SD card in, and select the kernel image from the BootMii menu
you installed when you rooted your console.
Welcome to Linux. (\~ o w o )\~ \_/
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what to do in order to update the system:
this is what your /etc/apt/sources.list file should look like:
deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports unstable main
deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports sid main
deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports experimental main
this is because Debian, in true bastardy, has removed support for
PowerPC CPUs. you need to get the apt repository that they've archived.
but once you'd done that, and you've got your networking going, (which
most would be able to do because it's debian), you should be able to:
> apt-get update
and then All Should Be Right In The World. with a simple
> apt-get install emacs
you should now be able to use emacs on your Nintendo Wii
:-)